BOULDER — It's the norm in media coverage of Muslims to show faces contorted in rage, without looking beyond the most violent, provocative photos to the real lives of average Middle Easterners, a panel of local scholars observed Thursday at a conference this week at the University of Colorado.

The "Muslim Voices in the Heartland" conference, held Thursday through Saturday, followed weeks of violent reaction — in 20 countries — to an anti-Muslim film, which coincided with the Sept. 11 killing of a U.S. ambassador and three other men in Benghazi, Libya.

Newsweek magazine's Sept. 24 cover story, "Muslim Rage," showed faces twisted in apparent hate as the Islamic reponse to a film produced in the U.S. insulting the Prophet Muhammad, said CU-Boulder assistant journalism professor Nabil Echchaibi. Many magazines and newspapers were nearly identical in their approach.

Yet the world's 1.6 billion Muslims were far from monolithic in their response to the film, said Echchaibi, director of the recently completed Muslims in the Mountain West Project — a joint study of the Centers for Media, Religion and Culture and Asian Studies at CU-Boulder.

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Because mainstream media have failed people in the U.S. and abroad, Muslims and non-Muslim, all find themselves at the mercy of extremists on both sides, he said.

"Western media is unable — incapable — of in-depth analysis of complex issues. They search for simplistic ways to explain things," said panelist Ibrahim Kazerooni, an imam for the metro-area Muslim community, who studies Islamic and other theologies and holds degrees in management and mining and petroleum engineering.

"What are the real crises behind such uprisings and uproar as we've seen?" asked Kazerooni. The film was the spark, not the fuel, for the fire, he said.

Kazerooni quoted another international observer's adaptation of a famous American political phrase: "It's not the film, stupid," even though many Americans choose to believe: " 'It's their religion that pushes them to be irrational.' "

Kazerooni, born in the city of Al-Najaf in southern Iraq to a family of prominent Shiite clerics, began religious studies but was arrested as a teenager in 1974 by Saddam Hussein's regime and imprisoned for more than five months. After his release, he eventually fled to England and later settled in the U.S.

He and two fellow panelists said media indulge Americans in a childish belief that they are under attack by Islam because of who they are, rather than understanding their role as aggressors because of U.S. foreign policies, such as longtime support for Hussein before eventually invading Iraq to topple him — both courses taken largely because of Iraqi oil.

The U.S. has long interfered in the economies and governance of countries throughout the region to serve its strategic interests, Kazerooni said. U.S. drone strikes that kill civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan are now high on a list of grievances. Palestinian troubles have festered for decades.

Megan Reif, an assistant professor of political science and international studies at CU Denver, said it's what's left out of coverage of the anti-film riots that is damaging.

In most places, other than in Pakistan, violent protests were carried out by "a minuscule percentage of the population," Reif said, mostly by chronically unemployed, desperate young men. Yet coverage of these few have affected the presidential political campaign and more.

"It alienates (Muslims) when the media fails to differentiate between the few on the street and the average Muslim," Reif said.

The coverage of the Arab Spring — pro-democracy uprisings across the Middle East — also was spotty and shallow, the panelists said.

If the U.S. puts its "stamp of approval" on an uprising, Kazerooni said, the implication for the Muslim audience is that the revolution has been "hijacked or derailed," and any touted democratic reforms are more "window dressing" than substantive.

The media have failed ordinary Muslims, Echchaibi said. For a sense of who they are in this region, the Muslims in the Mountain West Project set out around 2009 to "chronicle the experiences of Muslims as they live and imagine their own Americanness" using interviews, podcasts, photos and videos in six Rocky Mountain states. Echchaibi was stunned to find how thin the record was before the project.

"We scoured every single archive. We went to historical societies in all six states. The problem was there was really very little information," Echchaibi said. "We were starting from scratch."

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports the estimated 2010 U.S. Muslim population at 2.6 million, or about 0.8 percent. Pew data suggest Muslims account for less than 0.5 percent of Colorado's population, or roughly 25,000. Yet recent estimates commonly used by media for the number of Muslims in metro Denver alone have ranged from 5,000 to 30,000.

In 2009, about 12,000 Muslims attended a communal celebration at the end of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, held at a hotel near Denver International Airport.

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